Monkeys: How to get rich.

I recently got an email with a brilliant little fairytale about how to trick people into happily giving you all their money. I wanted to share with you, but it was in Dutch, and the origin was cleary not the original author.

Today I was rummaging around the internet to see if I could find the original author, and I did. I found out that the Dutch story was freely translated from an English source. Here’s the original story from that English source, unaltered (and with reference):

Let Me Google That For You

We’ve probably all had it. Just when you thought you found the right number of Palindromic Square Sums, you receive a mail from somewhere up the chain of command with a cry for help. The rather lengthy mail contains 3 paragraphs on why this mail was so important, why it was sent to you and why you need to reply “immediately”. At the end of the mail, there is a fairly trivial question like “How many pounds is in one kilogram”?

So you search Google and find out that 1 kilogram is 2.20462262 pounds. Depending on your irritation, you mail the information, or a link to the google results (because it is a top hit). For people not taking the hint of your Google url, there’s now another nice option, called “Let Me Google That For You”. 

It’s a bit more obvious to the hard hearing, and less blunt than a similar service I used a few years ago. Here’s the empty link so you can roll your own: letmegooglethatforyou.com

J-Fall 2008

Last wednesday I was at J-Fall 2008, a fairly large event for Java programmers in the Netherlands. This event is organized by NLJUG. You can read some of my notes on the different sessions in my public evernote.

Zoom Experience 2008

Last sunday, I was at the Zoom Experience 2008 in Utrecht. The organization has learned a lot since last year’s debute of the Zoom Experience. There was plenty of room to walk, lots of places to sit down and talk, and the talks were in seperate areas with less noise.

This is what the Zoom Experience looked like on Sunday morning:

Transporting Oracle CHARs over a dblink

At work, we’ve got two Oracle databases and a Java web application. One of the tasks of the web application is to copy tables over from one database to the other. Last week we ran into a funny problem which turns out to be an Oracle bug.

I’ve posted a question about this last week on stackoverflow.com but it seems that not many people are affected by this particular problem, or at least not many people know the answer to this particular little problem. We set out to tackle this and we did.